Macy's Mishap By No Means First For Blight 37

The name sounds dull, bureaucratic, perhaps even benign. The title does not begin to reflect the utter waste that this choice piece of downtown real estate has become.

With the announcement Wednesday that the city's talks with Macy's collapsed, developers, retailers and politicians are taking Block 37 back to square one.

Now the chatter resumes. Tax breaks. Rent rebates. Anchor retailers. A new developer, maybe. Yap, yap, yap. The talk circles around the block, just as it's gone for nearly 10 years. Ever since the city razed most every wig store and Going-out-of-Business! electronics shop in sight.

We'll hear the same empty talk 10 years from now, no doubt.

Macy's merely made official what everyone knew all along. It never really wanted to build on State Street. If it had, Macy's would not have demanded Michael Jordan money--$55 million from the city--just to come to town and sell people stuff.

It's a twist on the old saying: Macy's wanted to take money to make money. Mayor Daley was right to squeal like a stuck pol.

Macy's walks, and there Block 37 sits: a muddy, rocky flat where a shopping landmark, some office towers, something useful should be. No one even has the decency to cover it with grass.

It's imprisoned by State, Randolph, Dearborn and Washington streets. Twice a year the city lets visitors through the seven-foot-tall fence, for winter ice skating and a summer art show.

The very name of the place encourages inaction. Block 37 sounds inert, as if it belongs on the Table of the Elements. Next to uranium, or even kryptonite.

And it's costing everyone a lot of gold. The city has frittered more than $30 million on a vacant lot. Time and again, developer JMB Realty has pulled the lever on this one-block bandit, to the tune of $75 million.

Taxpayers and rich people alike pour big bucks into a black hole, and still they call it Block 37. As if it's the foundation of something, a building block.

It took years of mismanagement to create this stumbling block. In the early 1980s, JMB floated a hallucination, calling for a $500 million multiuse development on the spot. The city got hooked, and wouldn't settle for less. And Macy's is but the latest of a line of retailers that got greedy when it saw a $166 million pool of tax breaks earmarked for a district that includes the site.

The developer, the mayor and the shopkeepers made a grab for money or glory, and left the rest of us with a severe case of gridblock.

Changing the name might change the equation. Labels can spur people into action. Cold War had us building fallout shelters. Apollo put men on the moon.

Block 37 needs a birthright that shames mayors and developers just to utter it. A name that conjures disaster as clearly as Edsel, Chernobyl and Arch Deluxe.

Blight 37.

Blight 37. It's a name of action. Mayor Daley would not dare shrug his shoulders, mutter "We'd like to see something happen on Blight 37"--and then do nothing. Some would-be shopper would whap him on the noggin with a Little Brown Bag.

Even the hucksters at the Greater State Street Council might balk at touting the potential of, ahem, Blight 37.

Consider the end game. If Daley finally does fork over millions to the next would-be tenant, the caption would give him cover. "It's a small price to remove this Blight from our great city," he'll boast. "The people of Chicago can shop in peace."

Blight 37: Eradicate it soon.

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David Greising's column appears on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact David at DGreising@Tribune.com.